What the Strongest Tropical Cyclone Ever Recorded Looked Like From Space

Hurricane Patricia made landfall on the Pacific coast of Mexico on Friday, and was downgraded to a tropical storm early Saturday morning. The storm is remarkable not only in terms of how powerful it became: yesterday morning, a group of courageous men and women flew into the damn thing and measured wind speeds of 200 MPH and a minimum central pressure of 880 millibars; instead standing out because of how quickly it grew. On October 22, Patricia was a Category one hurricane. By 8 am eastern time on October 23, 2015, it had been upgraded to a Category 5 and flagged as the strongest eastern north Pacific hurricane on record.